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The Policy ThinkShop Comments on Other Social Media: BIG BROTHER IS LISTENING AND SHARING

BIG DATA is changing the world. Because it is predominantly a high tech, expensive and rapidly changing business endeavor, governments have to collaborate, borrow and share in order to play in the BIG DATA game.

What are the implications for the relationship between government control and individual privacy and freedom? When government morphs into a global player, sharing and collecting on the open market your personal data, what are the implications for protecting your own interests in relations to the interests of corporate giants and world stage political actors who are protecting pursuing their own interests and wants?

“The power of information is in the eyes of the beholder–especially public opinion. What we know and think about what others know is crucial for the future of privacy in our societies and perhaps freedom itself.”

Can modern government police itself? Has the American government gotten too big and too powerful in the age of big data, billion dollar budgets and heated global competition for its centenarian constitution? Are we too quick to personify the bureaucratic colossus and expect it to respond like an ethical and nimble organization? Have citizens become too powerful, overwhelmed and confused when given access information and the ability to disseminate it to the four corners of the earth in one instant? Technology and humanity have finally reached a turning point. Human possibilities are magnified immensely by technology for bad and for good.

What is America’s relationship to the world as it looks out on the horizon of international intrigue and what is its relationship inward toward its citizens’ civil rights?

“THERE was something surreal, in a Kafkaesque sort of way, about Barack Obama’s press conference on August 9th. Aiming to ease concern over the government’s surveillance programmes, the president announced reforms that seem both obvious and overdue. Then he criticised the man whose actions set those reforms in motion.

The president’s proposals include creating a group of outside experts to assess the government’s balancing of security and privacy. (When in doubt, create a task force.) More substantially, Mr Obama said he would like to change the proceedings of the secret court that approves electronic spying and interprets counterterrorism laws. Whereas now the court only hears the government’s side of any argument, the president wants to see an opposing viewpoint represented.

Mr Obama also said he would work with Congress to create safeguards against abuse of Section 215 of the Patriot Act, which allows the National Security Agency (NSA) to collect data about Americans’ phone calls. The administration will release the legal rationale for its snooping …”

After years of the seemingly inadvertent fomentation of distrust among its polity (the growing role of the U.S. government and the Vietnam war, for example), technology has opened up a potentially ubiquitous eavesdropping by the federal government that is eerily reminiscent of George Orwell’s 1984. It does not seem sinister, though, since it thus far appears to be the outcome of an aggressive privatization policy that was probably compelled by the rapid implementation of our most recent wars. Nevertheless, Americans have the right to ask question, remain vigilant and demand answers if not reform.

“A majority of Americans – 56% – say that federal courts fail to provide adequate limits on the telephone and internet data the government is collecting as part of its anti-terrorism efforts. An even larger percentage (70%) believes that the government uses this data for purposes other than investigating terrorism.

And despite the insistence by the president and other senior officials that only “metadata,” such as phone numbers and email addresses, is being collected, 63% think the government is also gathering information about the content of communications – with 27% believing the government has listened to or read their phone calls and emails.”

European hegemony may no longer be sustainable. The European economic community is being held together by a fragile piece of paper called the Euro. Aside from the currency, which a Pew Foundation survey reports is still favored by most European countries, there is little else Europeans agree about or even like about each other. Perhaps the onslaught of diversity perceived by growing right wing groups is the only glue left to hold Europeans together. The current economic crisis has seen much conflict and scapegoating regarding immigrants from mostly the African continent; but now Europeans seem to be turning against one another.

“The European Union is the new sick man of Europe. The effort over the past half century to create a more united Europe is now the principal casualty of the euro crisis. The European project now stands in disrepute across much of Europe.

Support for European economic integration – the 1957 raison d’etre for creating the European Economic Community, the European Union’s predecessor – is down over last year in five of the eight European Union countries surveyed by the Pew Research Center in 2013. Positive views of the European Union are at or near their low point in most EU nations, even among the young, the hope for the EU’s future. The favorability of the EU has fallen from a median of 60% in 2012 to 45% in 2013. And only in Germany does at least half the public back giving more power to Brussels to deal with the current economic crisis.

The sick man label – attributed originally to Russian Czar Nicholas I in his description of the Ottoman Empire in the mid-19th century – has more recently been applied at different times over the past decade and a half to Germany, Italy, Portugal, Greece and France. But this fascination with the crisis country of the moment has masked a broader phenomenon: the erosion of Europeans’ faith in the animating principles that have driven so much of what they have accomplished internally.”

To kill or not to kill? Seems to be the question for a post cold war America that struggles to find a useful venue and vehicle for its newly found monolithic world power status and the ways in which that lonely status make it an irresistible target for any group looking to be taken seriously and seeking a megaphone for its cause.

No one is raising the important issue of how simple and relatively inexpensive it might be to deploy this drone technology against the US and its allies. It seems logical that drone technology would be simpler and cheaper to create and deploy than a nuclear weapon, or a so called “dirty bomb.” So, what is really at stake here might be who is angry at the US and why? How can the US justify unilaterally searching out its defined enemies and taking them out gangster style no matter national sovereignty or international law.

The London Economist tackles this issue in a straightforward way yet with a focus and a lens that seems a bit ideologically myopic and perhaps a bit nostalgic for the cowboy days of George W.

You be the judge:

“T WAS so much simpler when George W. Bush was president. Outlining America’s plans for Osama bin Laden a few days after the September 11th attacks in 2001, Mr Bush declared: “there’s an old poster out West, I recall, that says, ‘Wanted: Dead or Alive.” For all those at home and abroad made uncomfortable by sweeping assertions of American power it was a moment of predictable provocation. Without surprise, they heard a swaggering Republican president vowing to make his country’s attackers pay, and seeming to pay no more heed to legal niceties than a cowboy bent on a lynching.

Yet 12 and a half years later, the cautious, lawyerly Barack Obama—a Democratic president with nothing of the…”

Amazing to see how young, vibrant and bubbly Hillary Clinton became a “Senior Statesman.” Anything is possible in today’s world and now we await Hillary’s next big step….

“After four exhausting years, Hillary Clinton leaves the State Department with an impressive record of air miles logged, town-hall meetings held, important but neglected issues highlighted, international crises defused, gaffes avoided, citizens of the United States and the world wowed, and White House policies …”

The so called “Arab Spring” seems to be turning into the “Democratic Quagmire” as the popular elections lead to discontent, factions and public frustration as the aftermath of destabilizing revolutions give way to hart times in the Middle East. The London Economist Magazine, ever the vigilant and sobering watchdog, gives us a glimpse on what is happening on the ground and the political currents that move the streets.

“WITH angry crowds across the nation baying against him, Egypt’s president wagged his finger at the people in a late-night televised speech. He declared a curfew for some cities, he called for support for the police, he deployed the army to the streets. Seemingly as an afterthought, he added a conciliatory call for …”

Like this:

The London Economist, like no one else can, gives us Americans a view of our neighborhood and the sleeping giant South of the Border…

“NEXT week the leaders of North America’s two most populous countries are due to meet for a neighbourly chat in Washington, DC. The re-elected Barack Obama and Mexico’s president-elect, Enrique Peña Nieto, have plenty to talk about: Mexico is changing in ways that will profoundly affect its big northern neighbour, and unless America rethinks its outdated picture of life across the border, both countries risk forgoing …”

One step forward, two steps back, it seems in the Middle East dilemma … A humane look at the psychological trauma perpetuated by Israel’s families as they get caught between Israel’s military policy and palestinian desperation.

“When the sirens went off on Thursday evening in Tel Aviv advising residents to seek shelter, it took my friends and family a few minutes to understand what was …”

The London Economist, ever the sober and clear voice of the pragmatic business minded political middle, reports and deciphers the Romnian ideological Etch A Sketch which now sings a song of sober statesmanship and moderation in hopes of capturing the American Middle Class and undecided vote …

“WARMING up for last night’s foreign-policy debate, I was curious about what the neoconservative crowd was thinking these days, so …”

In seemingly endless times of “trash talk” that led to an improbable and unpopular political victory, the newly minted president clamors: “Now arrives the hour of action.” Fleeting relief comes to the nation as the transition […]

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